George Whitman

INDIFFERENT as he was to modern amenities, George Whitman took some convincing to snuff out the candles for good and install electric lights in his Paris bookshop in 1959. His ramshackle labyrinth of dusty nooks and sagging bookshelves, some secured with twisted coat-hangers, was more a commune than a shop. Over the 60 years since he bought the place from an Arab grocer, using inherited money, an estimated 40,000 travellers have slept among the books, on makeshift beds or the floor, in his “socialist Utopia that masquerades as a bookstore”.

Mr Whitman expected guests to recite or write (choosing “cannonball” words, preferably), or at least help with chores. Most stayed a week or so; several settled in for half a decade. Le Mistral bookshop, renamed Shakespeare and Company in 1964, was a fitting endeavour for a self-described communist. He liked to say that all humanity was his teacher.

Over the years he bought more bits of the 16th-century building at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, just opposite Notre Dame on the Left Bank. He otherwise spent little. Vacation, he said, was moving from the book-lined third-floor flat that filled up for weekly breakfasts and afternoon tea parties, to the first-floor “writer’s room”. Usually reserved for favoured guests, it held prized first editions (including James Joyce’s “Ulysses”) and books signed by guests including Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and the Beat Generation icons William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg.

Although increasingly wealthy, Mr Whitman lived as though he were poor. His few part-time employees were paid modestly. Travellers in his “Tumbleweed Hotel” helped out for nothing. He even put shoppers to work. Occasionally pretty young female shoppers would be asked to watch the till for a few minutes. He sometimes returned hours later.

Rather than fuss with cleaning products, guests were told to scrub the floor with water and newspaper. The carpet could be glued down just fine with pancake batter and a hot iron. Mr Whitman encouraged shoppers to donate old shopping bags. Perfectly good food could be scavenged from rubbish bins.

Security, too, was lax. Mr Whitman couldn’t be bothered with alarm systems. Unwilling to buy a safe or make daily bank runs, he stored large wads of cash in books displayed for sale behind the cashier’s desk and even elsewhere in the shop and reading rooms. More than once, incredulous shoppers handed over cash-stuffed books to the guests manning the till.

Priority for the roughly 15 sleeping spots was given to travellers writing poems or a book. He gave hopefuls a yes or no within seconds. Some who were let in later surmised that he wanted to teach them a lesson. Mr Whitman once pulled off a sock and handed it to a guest who gave himself airs. He was to mop up the shop-cat’s mess and return the sock clean. Seeing him recoil, Mr Whitman announced that he had failed “a test of character, man.”

Poetry and smoke

At 12 he had spent a year in China, where his father, Walter, taught physics at Nanking University. After a Salem and Boston education he began, from 1935, to travel, often on foot, through Mexico and Central America and, after finding work on a sugar freighter, in Hawaii. Military service took him to Europe in 1941. After the war he opened a “book lounge” in Taunton, Massachusetts, and then settled in Paris in 1948. Rather than travel any more, he brought the world to himself.

Famous guests included James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Lawrence Durrell, Langston Hughes, Jacques Prévert and Richard Wright. “I’m ready for some fun!” he would say, before plunking down in a squeaky chair behind the cashbox to make small-talk and wisecracks, and to offer shoppers tea, wine or invitations to the next poetry reading or communal dinner. His generosity was sometimes misunderstood. Once, after telling three young female backpackers that he had a bed for them, the reply was, “I bet you have, you dirty old bastard!”

In 2000 the daughter he fathered at 69, Sylvia Beach Whitman, returned to live in Paris. Her mother had whisked her to England when she was six, breaking her father’s heart. Now he seemed to grow younger and less crotchety. He officially retired in 2006, but continued to live upstairs and roam the shop his daughter owned and ran. Shakespeare and Company now has a real cash register, a phone, a website, wireless internet, proper heating and fewer bugs. The beds are still free.

On a September evening ten years ago Mr Whitman lit a candle again, held it to his head, burned away clumps of gray hairs and patted out the flames, as he had done for decades, to the delight and feigned horror of two teenage girls. In the smoky writers room, he then recited a love poem penned in his youth. It ended thus:

Each dream, each midnight and each dawn

Are garments, thoughts of her put on

Each beam of light from the empyrean blue

With her enfolds the good, the beautiful, the true

Perhaps no man has ever given as much to travelling strangers, lest, as an inscription on a shop wall reads, “they be angels in disguise”.

New film: "Shame"

IN A Steve McQueen film every shot, no matter how incidental, feels freighted with significance. In ‘‘Hunger’’ (2008), his break-out feature, this visual seriousness was matched by a bleak subject: IRA prisoners on a hunger strike. We see a lengthy sequence of a guard going through his morning routine, his banal steps fraught with the knowledge that his car could be blown up by Republican paramilitaries at any moment.

In ‘‘Shame’’, Mr McQueen’s latest film, Michael Fassbender plays Brandon Sullivan, a handsome, well-paid and psychologically tormented New Yorker. Brandon lives an impeccably stylish life of starred restaurants, minimalist furnishings and an impressive record collection. What mars this picture is Brandon's all-controlling need for sex—empty and relentless—which threatens to destroy him and his shiny existence.

Mr McQueen’s camera moves with the same steady focus as it did in ‘‘Hunger’’. He composes a poetic vision of the city, from grimy subway underpasses to roof-top bars, and sets it against a grandiose soundtrack of Bach and Harry Escott’s swelling, mournful score. Yet the plot and scripting of ‘‘Shame’’ do not live up to the beauty of Mr McQueen’s shots, and certainly do not justify the constant emotive nudging of the background music.Both Brandon and his more outwardly damaged sister Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan, are ultimately flimsy characters. This flimsiness is masked to some extent by the skill of the two leads. With subtle inflections and a poignant jumble of mannerisms and flinches, Ms Mulligan especially manages to make compelling what is essentially an unremarkable little-girl-lost character. A scene when Sissy waits on a train platform with Brandon, gently teasing and arguing with him, is deft and understated. But ultimately her character is reduced to a cheap shock scene near the end of the film—a move beneath both cast and director.

Unlike the role in "Hunger" of Bobby, an IRA martyr also played by Mr Fassbender, Brandon is never quite made human to the audience. He and Sissy are interesting to watch because they are beautiful, troubled and mysterious. (The only clue of their odd origins is when Sissy whispers, "We’re not bad people...we just come from a bad place.") But beyond this they are undeveloped. The problem is encapsulated in a lengthy scene, filmed in almost a single shot, in which Sissy, a lounge singer, performs a breathy version of ‘New York, New York’ that brings Brandon to tears. The scene is perfectly composed, beautifully shot, finely acted, yet strangely without effect. Perhaps the blurriness of the characters in ‘‘Shame’’ was intended to make them intriguingly cryptic everymen, but in the absence of specifics they simply seem badly drawn.

Foreign languages

What makes some people learn language after language?

Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners. By Michael Erard. Free Press; 306 pages; $25.99. Buy from Amazon.com

CARDINAL MEZZOFANTI of Bologna was a secular saint. Though he never performed the kind of miracle needed to be officially canonised, his power was close to unearthly. Mezzofanti was said to speak 72 languages. Or 50. Or to have fully mastered 30. No one was certain of the true figure, but it was a lot. Visitors flocked from all corners of Europe to test him and came away stunned. He could switch between languages with ease. Two condemned prisoners were due to be executed, but no one knew their language to hear their confession. Mezzofanti learned it in a night, heard their sins the next morning and saved them from hell.

Or so the legend goes. In “Babel No More”, Michael Erard has written the first serious book about the people who master vast numbers of languages—or claim to. A journalist with some linguistics training, Mr Erard is not a hyperpolyglot himself (he speaks some Spanish and Chinese), but he approaches his topic with both wonder and a healthy dash of scepticism.

Mezzofanti, for example, was a high-ranking clergyman born in 1774. In most of his interactions, he would have been the one to pick the topic of conversation, and he could rely on the same formulae he had used many times. He lived in an age when “knowing” a language more often meant reading and translating rather than speaking fluently with natives. Nonetheless, Mezzofanti clearly had speaking talent; his English accent was so good as to be almost too correct, an Irish observer noted.

To find out whether anyone could really learn so many languages, Mr Erard set out to find modern Mezzofantis. The people he meets are certainly interesting. One man with a mental age of nine has a vast memory for foreign words and the use of grammatical endings, but he cannot seem to break free of English word-order. Ken Hale, who was a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and died in 2001, was said to have learned 50 languages, including notoriously difficult Finnish while on a flight to Helsinki. Professional linguists still swear by his talent. But he insisted he spoke only three (English, Spanish and Warlpiri—from Australia’s Northern Territory) and could merely “talk in” others.

Mr Erard says that true hyperpolyglottery begins at about 11 languages, and that while legends abound, tried and tested exemplars are few. Ziad Fazah, raised in Lebanon and now living in Brazil, once held the Guinness world record for 58 languages. But when surprised on a Chilean television show by native speakers, he utterly flubbed questions in Finnish, Mandarin, Farsi and Russian (including “What day is it today?” in Russian), a failure that lives in infamy on YouTube. Perhaps he was a fraud; perhaps he simply had a miserable day. Hyperpolyglots must warm up or “prime” their weaker languages, with a few hours’ or days’ practice, to use them comfortably. Switching quickly between more than around six or seven is near-impossible even for the most gifted.

Does that mean they don’t really know them? Is instant availability of native-like competence the only standard for “knowing” a language? How should partly knowing a tongue be tallied? What if you can only read in it? Mr Erard repeatedly peppers his text with such questions, feeling his way through his story as a thoughtful observer, rather than banging about like an academic with a theory to defend or a pitchman with a technique to sell.

Hyperpolyglots are more likely to be introverted than extroverted, which may come as a surprise to some. Hale’s son always said that, in his father’s case, languages were a cloak for a shy man. Another, Alexander Arguelles, has learned dozens of languages only to read them, saying “It’s rare that you have an interesting conversation in English. Why do I think it would be any better in another language?” Emil Krebs, an early-20th-century German diplomat who was also credited with knowing dozens of languages, was boorish in all of them. He once refused to speak to his wife for several months because she told him to put on a winter coat.

Different hypotheses may explain part of the language-learner’s gift. Some hyperpolyglots seem near-autistic. In support, Mr Erard points to the theory of Simon Baron-Cohen, of Cambridge University, that autists have an “extreme male brain” that seeks to master systems. Another hypothesis is the “Geschwind-Galaburda” cluster of traits. Supposedly resulting from abnormal antenatal exposure to hormones, this cluster includes maleness, homosexuality, left-handedness, poor visual-spatial skills, immune disorders, and perhaps also language-learning talent. Brain areas are also keyed to certain skills. The left Heschl’s gyrus is bigger than average in professional phoneticians. People who learn new vocabulary quickly show more activity in the hippocampus. Krebs’s brain, preserved in slices at a laboratory in Düsseldorf, shows various unusual features.

The discovery of the FOXP2 brain gene, a mutation of which can cause language loss, was met with considerable excitement when it was announced over a decade ago. But the reality is that many parts of the brain work together to produce speech and no single gene, region of the brain or theory can explain successful language-learning. In the end Mr Erard is happy simply to meet interesting characters, tell fascinating tales and round up the research without trying to judge which is the best work.

At the end of his story, however, he finds a surprise in Mezzofanti’s archive: flashcards. Stacks of them, in Georgian, Hungarian, Arabic, Algonquin and nine other tongues. The world’s most celebrated hyperpolyglot relied on the same tools given to first-year language-learners today. The conclusion? Hyperpolyglots may begin with talent, but they aren’t geniuses. They simply enjoy tasks that are drudgery to normal people. The talent and enjoyment drive a virtuous cycle that pushes them to feats others simply shake their heads at, admiration mixed with no small amount of incomprehension.